Twenty-five years have passed.
I still hear the second plane.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I had just emerged from the subway near City Hall after voting in New York City’s primary. As I looked south, as every New Yorker instinctively did, my eyes found the Twin Towers rising above Lower Manhattan. They dominated the skyline, so familiar that most of us scarcely noticed them anymore.
That morning, one tower was burning. Like everyone around me, I prayed it had been a terrible accident. Then another jet appeared over New York Harbor. Seconds later, it disappeared into the South Tower.
The gasp that rose from the crowd is a sound I have never forgotten. This was no accident. America was under attack.There was no time to absorb what I had just witnessed. As commissioner of the New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services, I was a member of Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s senior leadership team, and my responsibility that morning was to help the mayor keep New York City functioning while it was under attack.
I made my way toward the mayor’s Office of Emergency Management, then housed inside 7 World Trade Center. Before I arrived, a police officer warned me that the building itself was no longer safe. I turned instead toward the temporary command post where Mayor Giuliani and the city’s emergency leadership had begun directing New York’s response.
Within minutes, decisions that ordinarily would have taken weeks had to be made in seconds. I asked the mayor for authority to evacuate every city-owned and leased office building south of Canal Street — nearly 10 million square feet occupied by thousands of public employees. He approved it immediately.
There were no lengthy meetings. No consultants. No committees. Only judgment.
Looking back, one of the wisest decisions made that morning belonged to our chief engineer, Joe Wagner, who ordered city engineers and custodians to shut down the ventilation systems before the towers collapsed. Almost no one noticed the decision, yet it likely spared countless city employees from breathing the toxic cloud that engulfed Lower Manhattan.
The shell of one of the twin towers is all that remains after two airliners crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
As the morning unfolded, communication itself began collapsing. Cellphones failed. Landlines became unreliable. Computer systems disappeared. We relied on handheld radios, experience, and instinct.
By then, another realization settled over Lower Manhattan. Ambulances had lined the streets waiting to carry the injured to hospitals across the city. Then, gradually, they stopped leaving. There were almost no survivors to transport. In the silence that followed, the magnitude of what had happened became impossible to ignore.
By early afternoon Mayor Giuliani, Gov. George Pataki and senior officials faced another impossible question: Should all of Manhattan be evacuated? After careful discussion, the decision was narrowed to evacuating south of 14th Street.
Later that afternoon I stood beside Mayor Giuliani during his first press conference after the attacks. My suit and hair were covered with the white debris that had blanketed Lower Manhattan, and a respirator hung around my neck. Only moments earlier I had learned that my friend Neil Levin, chairman of the Port Authority, who had been having breakfast at Windows on the World, was almost certainly gone. I had no idea that images from that first press conference would be broadcast around the world and replayed on every Sept. 11 anniversary for years to come.
For nearly two months afterward, I visited Ground Zero almost every day. My department supplied the men and women working there with food, medical supplies, protective equipment, vehicles, fuel, clothing and countless other necessities.
Those weeks taught me that America is sustained not only by extraordinary people, but by ordinary people willing to accept extraordinary responsibility. The custodians, mechanics, engineers, clerks, truck drivers, police officers, firefighters, construction workers, sanitation workers and volunteers rarely appeared in newspapers. Their work helped save a city.
Twenty-five years later, I worry less about whether Americans remember the events of Sept. 11 than whether we remember the character we discovered in ourselves. For a brief time, politics disappeared. Titles disappeared. Differences disappeared. Everyone understood: Help. Serve. Endure. Rebuild.
Some of the young Americans who will read these words were not yet born on Sept. 11, 2001. Others know that day only through photographs in history books. They deserve to know more than how America was attacked. They deserve to know how America answered. That is why I have written these words 25 years later.
Memory is not simply about preserving the past. It is about preparing the future.
The terrorists destroyed magnificent buildings and stole nearly 3,000 innocent lives. They scarred our skyline and our hearts. But they failed in the objective that mattered most. They did not break the American spirit. They revealed it.
When I think back across 25 years, I no longer hear only the second plane. I hear firefighters climbing stairs they knew they might never descend. I hear police radios crackling through the dust. I hear volunteers asking where they were needed. I hear a great city refusing to surrender.
Those are the sounds I hope future generations remember.
Because the greatest lesson of Sept. 11 is not simply how America was attacked. It is how Americans answered.
Never forget.
William J. Diamond of Palm Beach is a former member of the Town Council and a former New York City commissioner.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Never forget the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington | Letter